


Die Another Day

by anthologia



Series: From Gotham (With Love) [2]
Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics), Nightwing (Comics), Red Robin (Comics), Robin (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Banter, Chronic Medical Condition, F/M, Implied/Referenced Torture, Kidnapping, Rescue Missions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-12
Updated: 2016-01-12
Packaged: 2018-05-13 12:38:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5708413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthologia/pseuds/anthologia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dick may be a skilled and highly-trained agent with a great success rate and years of experience, but sometimes even he isn’t immune to having a shitty day and waking up with a pounding headache in a room with concrete floors and no windows. Good news: he doesn’t really feel sick or dizzy, so if he has a concussion, it has to be pretty mild. Nothing feels broken. All parts of his body are still present and accounted for. Less good: he’s tied up and cuffed, which seems a little overkill, but then again, he can probably slip both, given enough time.  The only agent close enough to be of any theoretical help is Tim, who’s an analyst and not a field agent, so it’s definitely up to him to find a way out before his captors get to the interrogation part of the evening’s entertainment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Die Another Day

**Author's Note:**

> The 'Dick finds out Tim was Robin' sequel to "From Gotham (With Love)".

Dick may be a skilled and highly-trained agent with a great success rate and years of experience, but sometimes even he isn’t immune to having a shitty day and waking up with a pounding headache in a room with concrete floors and no windows. Taking stock, there’s a couple ominous containers in the corner that probably hold the _enhanced_ in enhanced interrogation and a drain built into the floor for – he’s guessing – easy clean-up, which isn’t really the _best_ sign.

Good news: he doesn’t really feel sick or dizzy, so if he has a concussion, it has to be pretty mild. Nothing feels broken. All parts of his body are still present and accounted for. Less good: he’s tied up _and_ cuffed, which seems a little overkill, but then again, he can probably slip both, given enough time. The only agent close enough to be of any theoretical help is Tim, who’s an analyst and _not_ a field agent, so it’s definitely up to him to find a way out before his captors get to the interrogation part of the evening’s entertainment.

He gets maybe ten minutes to consider escape possibilities before the door opens. The man who comes through the doorway doesn’t look familiar, which is – _fine_ , apparently, because he just collapsed. Someone wearing a black face mask and wielding a bo staff steps delicately over the unconscious body on the floor. Female, 5’4”, maybe 5’5”. Presumably reasonably skilled with that staff, even if he didn’t get a chance to see her actually using it. The way she moves is…

_No. way._

“Are you hurt?” Tim asks.

“Nothing bad,” he says, because he’s good at letting his mouth run on autopilot while his head is somewhere else entirely. Did she launch a rescue mission _on her own_? No one at the agency is exactly _helpless_ (ask him about his terrifyingly deadly paraplegic ex sometime; better yet, _don’t_ ) but God, as far as he knew, she hadn’t even gone through any field courses. She sat at a desk and did an amazing job of saving his ass from a safe distance, where she didn’t have to contend with anything more immediately dangerous than high blood pressure from trying to direct stubborn field agents.

“Good. We have a window of _maybe_ three more minutes before they notice something’s wrong.” Tim saws through the ropes with a small but very sharp knife and then attacks the cuffs with a set of lockpicks. When they click open, she grabs his arm and pulls him to his feet. The hall outside is clear, and the part of him that’s still a little stuck on the mental image of her as his cute, smart analyst with no field experience wants to object to her heading out first, but she’s armed and probably knows where she’s going better than he does, so he’ll let her take point on this.

About a minute and a half in, alarms start blaring. Tim takes his hand and _runs_ , directly into a group of about a half-dozen guards around the corner. Even unarmed, there’s at least a fair chance he could take them, but instead, Tim glances down at his shoes, extends her bo staff, and slams the end of it against the ground. Enough of an electric shock comes out to knock the guards out briefly, which is. Holy _shit_.

Back when Jason Todd, the second Robin, died, Dick told Bruce that he didn’t want to have anything to do with any more Robins. He wouldn’t train them, wouldn’t speak to them, didn’t even want to know their names. Even though Bruce agreed to Dick’s terms, certain things still filtered down the grapevine to Dick about the next Robin after Jason. One of those things was that her signature weapon was a bo staff that carried a nasty electric charge.

His cute analyst is the third Robin. Jesus _Christ_.

She glances at him, and he _thinks_ he might see movement under the mask like she’s smiling. “Talk later. Escaping now.”

“Right.” _Christ,_ okay. He can save all the _what the fuck_ for when they’re safe, probably.

 

 

Once they hit her base of operations (technically a hotel room rented under a false name), Tim does a quick bug sweep and then grabs a medical kit from her luggage.

“I’m fine,” he says automatically, and she wrinkles her nose at him.

“I doubt it, but as long as you don’t collapse, you can be an idiot if you want,” she says before tugging her shirt off, leaving herself naked from the waist up with the exception of a sports bra, because apparently today is the day Tim short-circuits his brain as many times as humanly possible.

In his – _their_ – occupation, scarring is basically a given – there are days when Dick feels like he’s more scar tissue than skin. But seeing her torso peppered over with them just feels _wrong_ to the part of his brain that still wants to see her as an almost-civilian.

“If you’re going to be staring anyway, then do me a favor and let me know if you see anything bleeding that I miss. Even if it’s tiny,” she says, before efficiently disinfecting something on her arm.

His brain hasn’t really rebooted from the shock yet, but god, he can _try_. “You were the third Robin.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Once she’s content that the cut on her arm is sufficiently clean, she covers it in an antibiotic cream and bandages it before moving on to the next.

There’s a little cut on her back, above her hip; he’s not sure if it’s even bleeding anymore, but _even if it’s tiny_ , she’d said, so he grabs the disinfectant. “What are you – why are you a desk agent now?” he asks, and then sort of wants to kick himself. There’s a good chance the answer to that question isn’t something she’d want to talk about, no matter how much he wants to know. Things _happen_ to field agents.

“I’m not cleared for field work.” Once she’s done with the first aid kit, she pulls a clean shirt on, which he is not ashamed to admit is more than a little bit disappointing. “If you want to know more, you’re a spy. Figure it out.”

“I’m pretty sure you saving my ass this time rates at _least_ a full cheesecake,” he says, partly to give them something else to talk about and partly because he can think of a few reasons someone might feel the need to be this meticulous about first aid, and he doesn’t want to examine any of them in detail right now.

“It’s a _nice_ ass,” she says, and from the way her shoulders tense a tiny bit a moment later, he knows that she didn’t mean to say that out loud. He already _knew_ she was looking, but it’s always nice to have these things verbally confirmed.

“Maybe we should revisit the idea of post-mission, thanks-for-saving-my-nice-ass dinners,” he says.

“Maybe we should visit the idea of leaving my intercession out of the official report, instead.”

The plot thickens. “I’m not against the idea of getting to say I single-handedly fought my way out of an enemy base without actually having to do the work, but why?”

“You’re a spy – “

“ – Figure it out,” he finishes.

She grins at him somewhat lopsidedly. “You learn quick.”

“I learned from the best,” he says, and her expression flattens at the admittedly oblique reference to their mutual former partner. _Huh_. “We should get going. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I just single-handedly fought my way out of an enemy base. I probably pissed a few people off on the way.”

Tim snorts and shoves a bag into his arms. “When we get back, I’m putting in for an agent transfer.”

“You love me.”

“Agent. Transfer.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you are interested in my fics and want more, I have an account at syntactition.tumblr.com where I have bits of stories that are currently in the works and other ficlets and stories that haven't made their way to AO3.


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